The influence of segmentation and personas on the effectiveness of new product development in the railway passenger sector

Abstract

In a fast moving and competitive environment, companies are under high pressure to create new products to guarantee satisfied customers, long-term survival and profitability. In order to evolve own products, firms can go into different directions, by including market-oriented approaches or just improve on an industrial level. Thus, this thesis is analyzing whether a market orientation in form of including personas or segments into the new product development has an influence on its effectiveness. Effectiveness is defined as creativity, innovativeness and attractiveness to a goal customer. The whole topic is explored in the railway passenger market in which most companies are nationalized and therefore have no segmentation strategies. The study shows, that a market-orientation can be beneficial to use resources of a company efficiently to attract the actual users. There is a significant difference in the perceived creativity between developed products without market input on the one hand and the inclusion of personas and segments on the other hand. Creativity is perceived higher for a product design which is not built on market input. Nevertheless, for innovativeness, market-oriented designs are perceived higher than the ones which do not have input about the customer. Attractiveness does not show differences across the designs. Although the variations are not high, a tendency can be seen for all three measures that personas always enrich information of customer segments. Overall, the railway market is evolving and the discussion about the influence of segmentation on satisfaction and product development will have more importance than ever before.

Date of Award	1 Jul 2019
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Rita Coelho do Vale (Supervisor)